Rep. DeLay Attacks Church-State Separation.

House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) attacked the Supreme Court's rulings on church-state separation, promoted voucher subsidies for religious schools and touted school prayer during a May 4 speech at the National Press Club.

In a speech devoted to "cultural renewal," DeLay, an aggressive Religious Right-style conservative known by the nickname "the Hammer" accused "a fashionable elite" of declaring war on "our nation's founding principles." According to DeLay, this elite, centered in universities, the media and the legal profession, seeks to drive religion from public life.

"We must resist the growing hostility to religion in our public schools, a hostility that the left pursues in the name of religious neutrality," DeLay said. "And we must restore respect for the many gifts of religious faith in our private and in our public lives."

The "fashionable elite," DeLay said, lauds flag burning and nude dancing but opposes prayers before football games. He asserted that morality cannot exist outside of religion and insisted that "in schools, public assistance offices, in our public spaces, the new intolerance has meant a purge of religion from public life."

DeLay added, "Next January, I believe that a newly elected Republican president, working with an expanded GOP majority in Congress, will together share a small window, just a small window, of promise to begin renewing America's culture.... Under a renewal partnership, I predict that next year Congress and the president will start clearing up two decades of confusing court decisions governing religion in our schools."

DeLay's remedies include broadly based legislation requiring the government to give funding to religion alongside secular programs. Such aid would include vouchers and other forms of tax aid to religious schools. Failure to do so, DeLay asserted, is discrimination.

"If a Catholic school wanted to participate in a program to provide computers to the classroom," he said, "it could do so without the need of a full-time federal police presence to make sure none of the computers were used to seek out religious material."

DeLay also called for a federal law requiring public schools to cease discriminating "against religious expression." According to DeLay, this would mean that students could pray voluntarily in schools and incorporate religious themes into their class work.

Asked to comment on DeLay's speech by news reporters, Americans United Executive Director Barry W. Lynn said it reflected "unparalleled ignorance." Lynn said the First Amendment already protects voluntary religious expression in public schools so new laws are unnecessary. DeLay's support for vouchers, Lynn said, is really a call for demolishing the public school system and forcing all Americans to pay taxes to support sectarian institutions.